Tech

Google Hangouts App: One Giant Leap for Chat Kind

Hands up if you've ever been in this situation: You start a conversation with a friend or family member at your desk on Instant Messenger. Away from your desk, you send them a text. Later on, you decide it makes more sense to speak face-to-face on Skype.

All of a sudden, you've got a balkanized conversation. And it's far, far worse if you're trying to involve multiple people. You quickly get to the point where you can't remember who said what to whom on what service on what device.

Wouldn't it be easier if it was all unified — if there was one conversation app to rule them all, on PC, tablet and mobile? Where you could pick up the conversation whenever, no matter what the platform, no matter what the year?

Guess Who?

Google has long been in a perfect position to dominate the realm of chat. The Hangouts service is the gold standard of video messaging. It's incredibly easy to add up to 10 people to a chat, and more importantly, to do fun stuff with them — share your screen, watch a video together, even wear silly hats and disguises.

Never has a more powerful piece of face-recognition tech been used for a more whimsical purpose. Google understands that wherever groups gather for social reasons, they need something to do. You need conversation pieces. You need the fun stuff. (In that vein, the company has created 850 new hand-drawn emoji for Hangouts' text chat feature.)

I've tried chatting with my family on Skype and iChat; both tend to slow down or break down, and a pleasant conversation devolves into a tech-support session. Google Hangouts just work. (Well, nine times out of 10 ain't bad.)

Until the company launched a standalone Google Hangouts app Wednesday, it was easy to be unaware of your option to Hangout on mobile. This was because you had to do it via the Google+ app. Mountain View doesn't miss an opportunity to push its social network on you. And that kept a whole load of less tech-savvy users — read, parents — at bay.

But to Google's credit: Now that it has decided to push Hangouts as a standalone service, it's pushing its capabilities to the limit. Facebook has chat heads; Google just vaulted to the head of the chat world. All that's missing is SMS and iMessage integration. But it's already starting to look like those services, at least.

Paradigm Shifts

Take a look at any SMS conversation. Your stream of texts with a given person never stops. The conversation may be infrequent, but it can go on forever. It thinks of chat as an infinite scroll.

It's odd that one of the creakiest chatting technologies in the world — plain old SMS, invented in 1992 — showed the way to the future of chat, but this is what seems to have happened. Facebook Messages picked up on the text-stream idea a while back. By adding video and photos, Google just leap-frogged them.

Now Hangouts never end; they just pause. The video chats live on, their times recorded, in a stream of communication. In this stream, you'll find seamless integration of Gchat messages. You can be chatting via Hangout on your iPhone, and what you just said will instantly pop up in your Gmail window.

You can share photos, and know they'll always be there in the social stream of your Hangout with a particular person at a particular time. This means the Hangouts app constitutes a credible alternative to Flickr, Instagram or Path; it's easier to find your photos if you remember who you sent them to.

(Sure, the photos technically live on Google+, but you can safely ignore that fact.)

On Hangouts for the iPhone, you can switch back and forth between video and Gchatting (or Google Talking, or whatever you want to call it). Which means Google just did an end-run around one Apple product — FaceTime — while also making irrelevant many IM apps in the Apple ecosystem. My favorite was IMO; now I have to consider whether I'll ever be using that app again.

Of course, you can probably guess the downside to all this. Say it with me now:

Privacy Problem

Remember how you could go off the record in Gchat? Well, you can still do that, but you can no longer make it the default for every chat. A tiny note on a support page was added Wednesday, and it said this:

We've made a change to the Google Chat and Google Talk chat history settings. You can turn individual chats off the record, but you'll no longer have the option to make chatting off the record the default setting for all of your chats.

Google, it seems from this typically roundabout way of delivering controversial feature changes, wants to nudge you into having a recorded history. It encourages you to see the Hangout as a softer, more social kind of stream — almost like Facebook Timeline.

What do you think? Will you download the app? How will you use it? Let us know in the comments.

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is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 42 million unique visitors worldwide and 21 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.